Career & Lifestyle

Self-Management Skills for Employees, or How to Be a Productive Employee

Daniel LinmanJanuary 10, 2011

Top 6 must-have abilities for workers

The development of self-management skills is one of management best practices for those people who have decided to become more productive employees. While companies tend to spend large amounts of money and energy to provide their employees with special self-management skills & training, each worker can personally organize self-assessment surveys to define whether he or she has the required skills set.

Such an idea is extremely important for workers who aggressively look at career development. Without the personal effort for developing self-organization and self-management skills, it’s hard to imagine a productive employee who succeeds in career promotion and professional advancement. This article is designed to help you answer the question “What are self management skills?” and how to be a productive employee.

What are Self-Management Skills?

Self-management skills are those abilities that allow an employee to feel more productive when doing daily routine regardless of the working environment. Well-developed self-management skills will help you efficiently communicate with co-workers, management and customers, make right decisions, plan your working time, and keep your body healthy.

To improve self management skills, employers often organize special self-assessment training. Usually such training is conducted by the HR department (or external trainers are employed). To develop self-management skills of the personnel, your company can organize self-development training sessions.

Any employer is interested in hiring a productive individual who has well-developed self-management skills because such an employee can fit the company’s requirements and show better productivity. For employees it’s highly important to develop self-management skills and abilities because higher productivity paves the way for career promotion and professional advancement. In any way, both the employer and the employee will benefit from developing abilities and skills for self-management.

The Skills Set

Here is a list of the key self management skills required for an employee to be more productive. If you’ve decided to achieve career advancement, you need to consider these best management skills list and work on the development of all the necessary abilities for self-organization.

1. Stress-Resistance

The first and foremost skill of self-management refers to a personal ability to resist any stressful situations. When you develop this self management skill, you can avoid many mistakes that people usually make when being stressed out.
Because a stressful situation usually blocks our ability to think and make rational decisions, we can’t cope even with the simplest tasks at the workplace, so our productivity goes down and we get frustrated. That’s why you need to develop this ability in order to be a productive employee able to offer resistance to a stressful situation.

2. Problem Solving

The second self-management skill requires you to use your brain as a mechanism for making right decisions. Even the hardest tasks and challenges can be efficiently handled if the mental process in your head is always in progress. Problem solving requires you to operate facts and make right assumptions to analyze the situation, review problems, and find effective solutions. Keeping your mind sober allows you to take right decisions even in the toughest situations.

3. Communication

The way how you can communicate information to others will determine your success. Communication is one of the key self-management skills required for both personal development and career advancement.

Being able to efficient communicate any information to other people means that you can share information with the minimized possible distortion and in the fastest possible way. Productive employees always can efficiently communicate with their colleagues and management because they comprehensively understand the value of clearly and timely delivered information. So be sure you work on developing this skill for self-management.

4. Time Management

Producing expected results in a timely manner determines the success of our effort. Time management is an extremely important self-management skill that makes an employee be more productive. There’s a great variety of time management techniques that show you how to develop this skill for self-management. Just use the web search to find plenty of them.

5. Memory

An ability to memorize events, names, facts, etc., allows an employee to remember about everything he/she needs to do daily tasks and duties. Among other self-management skills examples, committing to memory requires your personal effort for developing your mind abilities. There’s a lot of techniques for improving memory, so use the web search to find them.

6. Physical Activity

Keeping your body in good shape is a critical self-management skill example. When you feel healthy and have a robust nervous system, you can do more things and cope with many challenges. Physical activity (like jogging, fitness, different sorts of sports, etc.) allows you to strengthen your body, keep your muscles up, and be more productive.

How to Be a Productive Employee (Checklist)

Here’s a small checklist for you to help you develop your self management skills and abilities:

Make a to-do list. You can’t efficiently plan for anything having no to-do list. First you need to make a task list and specify the key tasks for developing self management skills examples. Use task management software to create and manage your tasks.

Prioritize tasks. Your to-do list may have a lot of tasks. But which tasks to complete first? To answer this question you need to consider all the tasks in your todo list and then set right priorities. By prioritizing the tasks you can decide what examples of self-management skills you’ll need to develop first (according to your current needs and employment requirements).

Schedule tasks. Scheduling allows you to set deadlines and timeframes for your tasks. Use task management software to develop schedules and set task due dates relating to developing the self-management skills.

Be flexible. Regardless of your intentions and wishes, there will be days (caused by illness, vacation, holidays etc.) when the external world won’t let you develop your self management skills. That’s why you need to be flexible to get everything done through putting your tasks on hold and then returning back to the prioritized items on your to-do list. You shouldn’t be frustrated and stressed out when you can’t do a task because of some external factor (e.g. illness) – just put everything on hold and get back to your tasks as soon as you get an occasion for developing self management skills.

Summary

The article demonstrated what self-management skills mean, showed the key examples of those skills and described a small checklist for employees. Hopefully it will help you be a productive employee. Please feel free to leave your comments and feedback.